Joe Wilson “was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.”
NYT columnist Frank Rich, as usual, is spot on — I’m beginning to think of him as a national journalistic treasure — beginning with the title of today’s piece, “It’s Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby” (sub. only, via Daou Report).
It didn’t matter at all to the WHIGs that their sales points and marketing techniques to sell the Iraq war were weak, dishonest, even laughable to anyone in the know. Or that real people would die! No matter. Make the sale.
Blake [Alec Baldwin, mocking]: “The leads are weak.”
The fucking leads are weak? You’re weak.
— Glengarry Glen Ross, IMDb
The WHIGs’ marketing campaign for war is weak? No matter. Close the sale! Towards the end, Rich writes:
It’s long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were “not involved” with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as “Bush’s brain,” he wasn’t smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald. (Emphasis mine.)
See, this is usually how dishonest salespeople trip themselves up: They’re so narcissistic and greedy, that they themselves — like their hapless sucker clients — sometimes fail to read the small print.
For a backgrounder snapshot of every member of WHIG, the bastards who sold the Iraq war to the people, the media, and Congress — with photo, infamous quotes, and “dish” — visit my “Glenngarry Glenn Rove.”
P.S. Frank Rich’s fine work is now subscription-only but you can read long excerpts at AfterDowningStreet.
“our democracy was hijacked on the way to war” is one that we really need to press on the dem candidates – how do they plan to restore democracy here at home?
If this doesn’t make for some interesting chatter around the office water cooler, what will? lol
from Rich’s excellent column here.
starts to make some sense now. I couldn’t understand why they’d destroy their own influence and status by closeting their star columnists in the “pay-only” box. It was, from a busines/marketing perspective, a shot to the head with their own gun. Now that we’re seeing the stunning mendacity of the paper’s publisher and editor, I’m wondering if this was simply the closest they could come to shutting up the writers they couldn’t control.
No. I strongly believe it’s about money. A friend, who’s worked in the field, tells me that it is enormously expensive for newspapers to run Web sites. I think it’s unfair to blast the NYT for doing this.
The NYT probably incurs close to, if not the most, expense of any newspaper in the world because of the number of hits, etc.
They had to pick a section of the paper that, if payment were required, people would still flock to … and they know their columnists are very popular .. so it was a natural. (They have done that with their bridge column, which is wildly popular among bridge players, and it worked, People subscribed just so they could read the column. Haven’t checked that in a long while though.)
Just like many of us subscribe to SALON to help it stay afloat financially — it’s almost gone under many times — we need to support SOME of these pay services so that the rest continues to be free.
I agree with you on this. I’ve thought about subscribing…..
I do have Salon Premium, but I can’t quite make the same leep for the NYT. Yet.
after the NYT’s HORRIBLE coverage of this story, there’s no way I would pay for the columnists. Instead I get them for free and without ads at either TruthOut.org or through my library’s on-line feature.
If the Times wants us to pay, they need to clean up their newsroom and start reporting the news. Today, other than Rich, all the good stuff is on the WaPo’s site (including a John Potesta smackdown of Luie Freeh & his book, oops, trash.
I agree that the new NYT subscription thing with the op-eds is money-driven, but I think it’s a huge strategic mistake.
Grand papers like the Times need strong and broad powers of influence in the spheres of national or global dialog in order to stay at the top of the heap, and the opinion pages are a critical mechanism for spreading this influence.
I have no idea how much additional revenue the NYT might gain from this, (nor what percentage that revenue might represent of their overall income, but it seems to me that the damage done by loss of readership to the op-ed pages probably is greater than whatever economic benefit they get from the subscription trade. To my mind they’ve actually helped advance the influence of the odious Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages by reducing the reach of their own pages.
Certainly, with the addition of Brooks and Tierney, and the disintegration of Freidman as a relevant commentator, the Times op-ed page has suffered dramatically, and is nowhere near where it once was. But Krugman, Dowd, Herbert, and now Frank Rich are valuable voices the Times has managed, through this blunder, to diminish the impact of. Long term I think they’ll suffer for this, if Keller and Sulzberger don’t wreck it first.
Susan, it isn’t nearly as expensive to run a website as it is to print and distribute a print newspaper. Traditionally with print publications the rule of thumb was that sales paid for the cost of printing and distribution, while ads paid for everything else. If being online cost more than printing, this frogpond and all its cousins wouldn’t exist. If advertising were not the primary revenue source for print publications, we wouldn’t have all the thriving free weeklies and shoppers that we do.
Now traditional news outlets have a problem in that advertisers aren’t willing, apparently, to pay enough for online ads to subsidize editorial and fixed costs. If the columnists are indeed the NYT’s most read section, then cutting off the ad revenues they generate makes no business sense to me. Even worse for the Times in the long run will be the decline in discussion of what the columnists say. Other sources will quickly take up the slack and steal the NYT’s venerable reputation as the last word on the subject. That reputation has up til now enabled the Times to get premium rates for its premium stature.
I think once the mighty Times columnists fade into the background of public discussion the paper will find that it’s lost a priceless asset. I just hope it can recover in time.
I wasn’t blasting the Times for its columnist decision. I just think it’s an obviously bad one for the Times. The pittance that it will get for access to the columnists won’t begin to make up for the loss of buzz and ad revenues. My bet is that this policy will be reversed within the year.
Aside from its questionable business sense, there is also the problem of having a national newspaper’s opinion makers no longer freely available to the public for comment or questioning. If the Times wants to be the newspaper of record it has to have an accessible public record.
The real reason for the decision is most likely the usual one: the marketers/beancounters overruled the creators of the product. The editorial side is no doubt acutely aware of the damage being done to its long-term influence and prestige. Marketing droids, OTOH, never see beyond the next dime on the sidewalk. The Times is certainly not alone in its dilemma, and I hope it finds a way around it that makes more sense than this desperate scheme.
So right. Those are the types who think that the way to make more efficient a labor-intensive operation, such as a newspaper, is to cut labor costs.
D’uh. If you cut the people who write the news and features, you have nothing decent to put in the paper, then influence declines, and it’s a quick downhill slide from there.
Writing the stuff, day in and day out, on demand and on deaadline is incredibly stressful and draining. There’s a reason for the high burn-out rate among journos.
Agree completely. I think the Times has inverted the marketing model they would be most successful with. Opinions are more than free on the Internet; with the blogs and explosion of political sites the function of columnists is becoming redundant anyway, and the best competitive response is to keep them in the public eye and as accessible as possible. There’s not enough eyeballs for the sheer mass of bloviating!
But proper journalism involves work and resources that go far beyond opinion (always excepting you, Judy); I feel the Times has some obligation as a paper of record to keep fundamental public issues free or cheap, but there are many other unique features that it could sell or experiment with. I’d be willing to pay for the Science section, for example, (and possibly the Tech section), and surely cooking, travel, and others could also be premium items if approached correctly; the Times has prestige for a lot of things the general public doesn’t really notice. I’d bet you could squeeze nickels out of the Will Shortz crossword puzzlers although they’d scream bloody murder!
I think the real hassle would be keeping the virtual and pulp versions parallel and not cannibalizing each other via pricing structure, given their co-existence is likely to be indefinite.
Just a side note in case you missed it: this is apparently the first time the New York Times has published any story with reference to the White House Iraq Group — two days after someone on DailyKos discovered and published that fact. (It’s been at least noted in WaPo and other MSM previously.)
Good catch, but I don’t think blogs can take the credit. Deadline for such columns is several days before we see them, so I’m guessing Rich’s column was already set before the dKos diary. Be nice if the blogs were reponsible for it, though.
I especially like these 2 paragraphs as they address the broad nature of the deceptive agenda.
People with an authoritarian mindset always set themselves above the law, believing they have the right to impose their laws on others without being bound by them themselves. And make no mistake about it. The major players in the Bush regime are not democracy enthusiasts, they regard democracy just like the regard truth and the rule of law, obstacles to be circumvented or destroyed if they get in the way of theirown insane agenda.
WHIG is the perfect example of this; a cabal specifically designed for no other purpose that to trick the publicinto supporting the war by lying, and ruthlessly steamrolling anyone in their way.
They would have been right at home in Mussolini’s government, demonizing the Jews and Communists in order to legitimize a war in which the real goals were the accumulation of power and wealth.
Here is a Link to a SourceWatch/Center for Media & Democracy compilation of information regarding WHIG.
Contains some very good links, probably worthy of a diary, or an addendum to Susan’s, but I’m not the one to write it.
Peace
I have been using MSOC’s access- THANK YOU MSOC!!!If I need to I can subscribe myself- and I share my toyz,although not hub!
Me too. I was lucky enough to spot it when she put it up here in a comment awhile back.
I don’t know how to use it. The site knows I am on as me..where do I put in the code? THanks.
A very nice person got me a subscription. I was confused about that too since — like forever (since 1996?) — i’ve had the same login at the NYT. Then it dawned on me that I had to log out of my old login, and log back in using the new account. That worked.
Yes! Log out of your own original connection and log back in with the new name and password.
ok..but it then wants me to fill out all kinds of crazy info..should I just use a fake name and lie about all the other info? Did it ask you for a credit card number? Maybe that was when I tried to get a 2 week free trial.
I was logged in with MSOC’s name and password already so I logged out and attempted to log back in.
It didn’t work, so I figure MaryScott must have changed something.
I’ll miss Dowd and Krugman and Herbert and Rich, but it’s probably for the best. Susanhu talks about the funny feeling associated with using someone else’s paid subscription, (as though it’s cheating in some way, which I guess it is), and even when I used it I felt this funny feeling myself. I even wrote the Times an email bidding them farewell because of their decision to do this subscription thing and then the very next day I came across MSOC’s post listing her code and I shamelessly used it.
Anyway, I can’t/won’t pay the fee, so I have to hope the world won’t come to an end because I can’t read these folks every week.
anymore. Can’t figure out why.
MSO posted couple days ago that some one was using her account to purchase articles, and now I guess she decided to shut it down…
Well that was why I only used it to read– because it has an account and so on- so -JUST reading
Still workin here…
I can’t help it .. i have funny feelings about disseminating others’ accounts too widely. Is it the same as paying for one, but taking two, print copies of the NYT out of a newspaper bin, and giving the second free copy to a friend?
Call me a square! TELL me I’m a fool! It’s cool!
I just can’t escape the funny feeling.
I’ve said it before, but it’s a rainy Sunday, so I might as well be redundant: Frank Rich is a wonderful political columnist because he writes about politics as if it were truly bad theater–which it is.
And for those who didn’t read him when he was drama critic for the Times, your loss.
very familiar with him as Theater Critic..”Butcher of Broadway”…He reviewed a show I did once.
Um, maybe not so amusing when one is the target of his reviewing, but very entertaining reviews to read.
I guess I should feel honored…he said..”I was not without Promise” could he have said “I was Promising” NO..he had to twist the words..at least he gave us a few money quotes..I would hate to have been involved with the musical version of “Carrie”. At least he has moved on to real targets and can really make a diff in the world instead of picking on poor directors, writers, actors. He did champion “Angels in America”..He was a big fan of Gay plays or Musicals with gay themes. A big fan of great theatre dealing with minorities…He was groomed to become Bush’s worst NIGHTMARE. If only they would put him on the Front page.
I’ve written lots of dance and some arts criticism, and have always been conscious, especially in writing about something not so good, not to give away money quotes. Although it’s hard sometimes. If they’re justified, sure.
And I tried always to balance honesty and kindness. There were, nevertheless, a number of times when I felt called to review the scenery.